


Reclining Butterfly

by Zaniida



Series: Five Moments of Intimacy (MCU) [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (maybe), Additional Tags May Be Added, Compare and Contrast, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, FMI, FMNI, Five Moments of (Nonsexual) Intimacy, Gen, More Swearing Than My Norm, Movie Night, Parallels, Slave Loki (Marvel), deprogramming
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-02-24 17:00:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22121353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zaniida/pseuds/Zaniida
Summary: When Loki has a nightmare, Tony treats him to a movie night.  Loki is highly confused about his new master's expectations.And that'sbeforethe movie starts triggering half-buried memories….
Relationships: Loki & Tony Stark
Series: Five Moments of Intimacy (MCU) [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1626034
Comments: 50
Kudos: 114
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	1. Movie Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kaigee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaigee/gifts), [Shivanessa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shivanessa/gifts), [StarryEden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarryEden/gifts), [estenziia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/estenziia/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Downward Facing Dog](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20457794) by [EndlessStairway](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EndlessStairway/pseuds/EndlessStairway). 



> One more entry in the Twelve Days of Christmas gift fics for this year! This one was actually planned a while ago, but I got so busy with other projects that it took this little push to get the first part published here. This should be five chapters plus an intro (this chapter) and possibly an outro, so the "Five Moments" section should start with Chapter Two.
> 
> This is an offshoot of EndlessStairway's [Downward Facing Dog](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20457794/chapters/48540137), wherein Loki (from a different universe) has been thoroughly broken by Evil Tony into the perfect submissive slave, but then Tony from our universe rescues him and thus begins the long and complicated process of restoring his will and sense of self.
> 
> My fic here is not nearly so dark as DFD, and shouldn't go near the sexual content, but it does contrast Loki's memories of Evil Tony with the behavior of Good Tony; I'm not sure how dark it's going to get, overall. I've got the whole fic sketched out, minus the outro, so I'm hoping it won't linger _too_ long in the category of unfinished fics -- but then, I've never been great at predicting the future of my creative output.
> 
> Also, it's set somewhere after Chapter 19 and before the end of Chapter 24, so imagine that that section just got stretched out a bit, with Loki in Tony's custody for a longer period of time before everything went to Hel again. I'd been imagining a nice long period of slow recovery from the slave mindset, but of course EndlessStairway just had to jump into action-drama instead of giving us a few moments to breathe XD
> 
> * * *
> 
>  **Katie_Grey** , thanks for inspiring me to write this piece of comfort and character exploration! It turned out to be an even better plot bunny than I'd hoped for, and the film I chose turned out to have a ton of parallels to Loki's experiences. Watching it again with Loki Glasses on was eye-opening! I was surprised which characters he sympathized with or connected with, and just how _many_ ways the tales overlapped.
> 
> It's a bit late for the intention (comfort, to help you get through the darker parts of DFD), given that Loki's finally out of danger, but at least it's up ^_^
> 
>  **Shivanessa** , your comments about Loki's helplessness, confusion, and need for comfort have been quite enjoyable to read (even if I went overboard reacting to them -- again, sorry about that!), and it seems like this would be right up your alley. Hope you like it!
> 
>  **StarryEden** , you said that a non-romantic take on Slave Loki would be interesting, so here's another piece to enjoy besides _Tremble and Serve_. It's got a far more broken Loki, but the comfort should be pretty good, overall.
> 
>  **estenziia** , you liked Tony feeding Loki so much ("aaaahh this chapter is *chefs kiss* perfect, just what we all needed") that I figured you'd enjoy this one as well.
> 
> * * *
> 
> For those not familiar with my _Five Moments of (Nonsexual) Intimacy_ (FMI or FMNI) format, see a fairly pure form in [Pepper's Five Moments](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21997576), which details how it all works. I'm still hoping to see more authors tackle this fic form; I'd love to see it become as widespread and well known as the 5+1 fic or the Three Sentences fic.
> 
> This chapter mentions severe sleep deprivation, but I don't think there's anything else that really merits a trigger warning. Enjoy!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki didn’t resist—of course he didn’t resist—but it felt odd, being touched by his master’s hand in a way that was gentle and didn’t cause pain or correct unfitting behavior.
> 
> Soon they were sitting on a sofa (his master had not accepted his first attempt at seating himself on the floor), bundled up in fuzzy blankets, with bowls of fluffy white “pop corn.” At Loki’s evident confusion (especially at being handed a serving of the same food his master would enjoy), his master had given him a smile that was unexpectedly warm and yet tinged with concern, especially in the eyebrows. “It’s okay,” he said, “I get nightmares, too. This is one of the ways I deal with them: movie night.”

Loki’s former master had once kept him up for seven and a half weeks straight, which, it turned out, was about the limit of Loki’s physical ability to stay awake, regardless of stimuli or punishment. He wouldn’t have expected it to be quite so long, and it certainly hadn’t been pleasant; he’d gotten progressively less aware of his surroundings, less efficient with his work, less able to follow orders or to do much of anything useful. But he had been awake the whole time: His master’s greater self had verified it with scans.

All that, to train Loki out of crying out when he woke from nightmares. He’d learned, very thoroughly, to make no sound at all, regardless of disorientation or terror.

So he hadn’t expected his new master to realize that he was caught up in a nightmare, let alone to care enough to rouse him from it. Or, even more curiously, to tug Loki by the hand out of his cell, and lead him to the elevator. (Loki didn’t resist—of course he didn’t resist—but it felt odd, being touched by his master’s hand in a way that was gentle and didn’t cause pain or correct unfitting behavior.)

His master’s hair was rumpled from interrupted sleep, and he yawned a few times while they ascended. But perhaps he had some job for Loki to do, even at this early hour.

That assumption got progressively dismantled over the next few minutes, and soon they were sitting on a sofa, bundled up in fuzzy blankets, with bowls of fluffy white “pop corn” (a large bowl for his master, a much smaller bowl for Loki, whose digestive system was still not ready to handle regular food in any significant quantity).

At Loki’s evident confusion (especially at being handed a serving of the same food his master would enjoy), his master had given him a smile that was unexpectedly warm and yet tinged with concern, especially in the eyebrows. “It’s okay,” he said, “I get nightmares, too. This is one of the ways I deal with them: movie night.”

And then he attempted to choose a movie, leaving Loki to settle into that idea. What did his master expect of him, here? What sort of behavior would be acceptable, and what sort of behavior would be punished? He was already on the sofa, instead of the floor, but only because his master had not accepted his first attempt at seating himself. The blankets were warmer and softer than anything he had felt in… longer than he could remember, and they were clean and brightly colored and smelled lightly of mint. It was as though he’d stepped into a fantasy of the kind of luxury he could no longer even imagine.

“ _The Land Before Time_?” Friday asked through her speakers.

“One of the best animated films of all time,” Stark said, “and we do not need to be crying over dead mothers at three a.m.”

“ _Spirited Away_?”

“Also great. And about slavery.”

“ _Stardust_ ?”

“Yeah, let’s avoid movies that deal with fratricide.”

“ _Willow_?”

“Stolen baby,” Stark responded instantly, and starting ticking off on his fingers: “Fantasy racism, unwilling transformation, multiple forms of captivity, mind control, betrayal, dead mother, _evil_ mother, magical banishment, and probably a few more elements that aren’t coming to my mind this early in the morning.”

“ _Big Fish_ ?”

At this, Stark paused. “What was that one again?”

“I don’t believe you’ve seen it, sir. The fantastic adventures of a traveling salesman who uses exaggerated storytelling in order to—”

“All right, all right, let’s go with that one.” Stark waved a hand and settled back into the cushions, shooting a glance and another quick smile at Loki.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everybody's done Loki + Disney movies, most notably _The Lion King_ and _Lilo and Stitch_. I thought I'd go a different route ^_^
> 
> Until I started considering which film to use for this fic, I hadn't realized how many of my favorite movies hit straight at Loki's weak spots. Can't you just see him falling to pieces over Littlefoot losing his mother, or the brothers killing each other in _Stardust_ ? Slave Loki would probably have some really mixed reactions to Chihiro's journey in _Spirited Away_ (heck, he might fall to pieces over the thought of how she won allies and won free but he "never will").
> 
> And _Willow_? Holy cow. I need to watch that again, with Loki Glasses on, but just offhand, he'd react to:
> 
>   * Elora's mother getting killed in the first few minutes of the film, while trying to protect her baby (it'd hit both the loss of Frigga, and questions about his abandonment/rescue/kidnapping on Jotunheim)
>   * A helpless baby caught up in events too big for her (many, _many_ details of this, including Willow repeatedly trying to just get rid of her)
>   * Willow getting devalued and mocked for his 'magic tricks'
>   * Willow hoping to become a great sorcerer
>   * A brash, annoying warrior with long hair, who's quite full of himself, gets in trouble a lot, and gets out of it through luck more than skill
>   * …who attacks, insults, discounts, and uses Willow, and whom Willow is frequently chastising for trying to get them killed
>   * Surviving in the wilderness -- should bring back thoughts of his adventures with Thor
>   * Sorsha, raised by an evil parent who at times seemed to care for her, yet belittled her, used her, turned her into a pig, and tried to kill her
>   * An extended action scene on a snowy mountainside (complete with Willow terrified and shouting at his companion to do things less likely to get them killed)
> 

> 
> …basically, that's also a great movie to introduce Loki to, for additional angst and lots of character exploration ^_^
> 
> Anyway! A couple more days to go for the Twelve Days of Christmas gift fics run, and then I hope to get my Yearly Retrospective up, as well as get back to my regularly scheduled writing. Cheers!


	2. Fathers, amirite?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The movie does not bother me,” Loki says, shaking his head firmly. “It is…” He searches for positive things to say. “It reminds me of my father, and my brother.”
> 
> “Yeah?” His master snorts. “Guess we’ve got something in common after all. Which parts seem the most familiar?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this chapter got overlong, and I've decided to do split chapters, bumping this fic up from 6-7 chapters to 12 (five FMI segments at two chapters each, plus a start and end segment). At least, that's the plan.
> 
> Anyway, this is _Shared Experience (Part One)_ , in two senses: They're sitting down to share a movie together (letting down their hair), and they both know what it's like to have a father who failed to connect with his son.
> 
> Of course, that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to similarities between these two -- and the movie's gonna point out a lot of them. (If you notice that I've missed any obvious similarities between the movie scenes and Tony (or Loki), do point them out! I had to watch the scenes multiple times, with different viewpoints, trying to capture what Tony would think while watching it as well as what Loki would think. And I still haven't watched _Iron Man 3_ or _Civil War_ , so my frame of reference has a few holes in it.)
> 
> Don't think I need to warn for anything; it's canon-typical reflections on fatherhood, Tony starting to get drunk, and Loki having a slave's mindset, none of which should be surprising here.

Loki has never actually seen a movie.

The technology is familiar, of course. During the invasion, Barton had shown him how to tap into video surveillance, and he’s used similar tech (and their seidr equivalents) to contact allies, plan out strategies, and determine the position of their foes. Mostly when he and Thor were young enough that the worst trouble they got up to was the random dragon’s cave.

Loki’s master—his _former_ master, he reminds himself—used videos to teach him appropriate behavior, including the slave poses he’d been forced to mimic, over and over and over, until he thought of them so often that they invaded his dreams.

But the thought of using that technology as a form of storytelling… it’s hard to grasp, now, like a return to a time so distantly behind him that he can barely glimpse it through the mist. A point in his life when he had time to himself, time for leisure… when he and Thor could relax to the tales recounted by bards in the most exotic taverns, or trade memories across the campfire.

That nostalgic feeling, vaguely unsettling, gets stronger at the first image on the screen: a woman in flowing robes, holding aloft a torch. Something about her face, her hair, it… _means_ something, to Loki, only he can’t place exactly what. Someone in his past, perhaps. His former master’s campaign to break him has had severe effects on his ability to recall anything prior to the training; the memories are there (he thinks), but hidden, shoved to the back of his mind and out of his awareness. Adjusting to the life of a terrorized slave had been hard enough without constantly comparing it to the person he used to be.

Now, of course, there’s no one left who shares his memories; if he is to recall them, he must find ways to trigger them on his own. It’s possible that he will never know who the woman was or what she used to mean to him.

What next catches his attention is the thought of an uncatchable fish. Briefly, Loki envies the idea—being _uncatchable_ , truly and forever free—but then the same creature is suddenly called “the Beast”; he can’t help but flinch.

He steals a glance at his master, who is lounging there, eyes half-lidded, head nodding a little.

A wave of guilt makes Loki curl in on himself; if not for Loki, his master would be still in bed, not making do with a sofa and a neck pillow and a fuzzy blanket. He should never have been roused just to deal with the problems of his new slave. Loki wishes he’d just give up and go back to bed; of course, it’s not his place to express his own preferences, or to imply that his master is incapable of taking care of himself. If his master prefers “movie night” to sleep right now, then Loki has no right to gainsay him.

Still, as useless as he may be, Loki can find a way to use the time productively, make it of benefit to his master. He could, for example, use it the way his old master used videos: as a training exercise. Yes. Glean some hint as to the expected behavior in this world. Even though it was FRIDAY who chose the movie more than his master did, maybe Loki can still learn what new standards his master expects him to uphold.

As the man on the screen tells stories to a little boy, Loki notes the pictures on the wall, a child’s scribbles. One is a hero very much like Thor (cape and all); the rest are various creatures that might well have crawled up from Niflheim or swooped in from Muspelheim. A child with an interest in monsters, just like Thor—no doubt he’ll soon be learning how to kill them.

Indeed, the next scene shows that same boy, a little older, sitting around a campfire with other boys, surrounded by tents and trees. A camping trip, then, meant to prepare body and mind to deal with hardship and deprivation, along with teaching vital skills: hunting and tracking, woodlore, observation… how to bind wounds, mend clothes, and handle basic weapons in situations less predictable than squaring off against your peers in the training ring.

Even counting by short mortal lives, the boys don’t seem old enough to have graduated to metal weapons, but Loki feels heartened to know that _some_ aspects of child-rearing are the same across cultures.

But while most of the children sit in rapt attention (Loki is easily reminded of Thor and his friends), the boy that the story is focused on seems far less engaged, even a little irritated by the man—his father?—telling the same story he’d been telling in the bedroom. Already, Loki is developing a sort of fellow-feeling for the lad, knowing too well what it’s like to feel that disconnected from the group. (Of course, by that age, he’d learned to hide his own feelings just to avoid reproach.)

When the next scene reveals the boy’s mother, Loki feels that same well of nostalgia that the first lady provoked in him. As he considers her, he thinks… maybe… he might be thinking of his own mother. Her face won’t come to mind, although he can perhaps recall her arms around him, when he was small. The pleasure that her smiles brought to him. And… shame, at disappointing her, at hurting her… rejecting her…

His shoulders are tight, he realizes, scrunched up here on the sofa inside the fuzzy blanket that his master had wrapped him in. He tries to force his muscles to relax.

But then, a moment later, he’s watching that same woman cover for the faults of her husband, and Loki begins to wonder if the caring motherhood was a sham after all. The boy, now grown, is storming out of a celebration, and his mother is trying to appease him, even as his father captures the attention of every guest in the room.

On the day of the son’s wedding.

Loki finds himself recalling quite a different ceremony, and suddenly he’s seeing not his father, but his brother, as he was right before their lives got torn apart: vain, self-aggrandizing, incapable of stepping into a room without drawing all the light to himself.

And Loki had envied Thor so much it _choked_ him.

But then the son—Will—is confronting his father, and all thought of Thor is gone: on the screen he sees himself and Odin, in the vault, when he’d first learned about his true nature and felt his entire world crumble beneath his feet. His memories of his father, it turns out, are much clearer than those of his mother, the emotions too vivid for even his master’s training to wash away.

And just like the father in the movie, Odin had insisted that he’d done nothing wrong, or near enough. Even as his lies unraveled, and his son’s fragile mind with them.

“Ugh, _fathers_ , am I right?’

Startled, Loki glances over at his master, but Master doesn’t seem to be talking to him. He’s caught up in the movie, eyes glued to the screen, his glass swaying in the palm of his hand before he downs what’s left of his drink and contemplates the empty glass.

 _I’m sorry to embarrass you_ , the father on the screen says.

 _You’re embarrassing_ **_yourself_** _, Dad_ , Will retorts. _You just don’t see it_.

The father turns away, and Will’s voice says _After that night_ —

“Pause!” exclaims Loki’s master, and the movie stops as he starts to unwrap the blanket from around himself. “I’m gonna need a higher blood alcohol count for this thing.”

Before Master can quite get to his feet, Loki is up on his. “I can get it for you, master,” he blurts. “If you’ll tell me where?”

His master blinks up at him, seemingly surprised.

“Uh… yeah, okay,” he says, relaxing back into the cushions and pointing toward the bar. “FRIDAY, help him find the Talisker Skye.”

A few moments later, Loki is pouring his master a drink and feeling relieved—it’s the first time that Master has trusted him to perform any sort of task for him, and Loki no longer feels quite so useless. At a wave of Master’s hand, he leaves the bottle on a side table, and retreats to his blanket again (almost dropping to the floor by reflex, but correcting himself and taking the sofa again, as his master desires).

But his master doesn’t start the movie again. Instead, he stares at his glass, swirling the amber liquid around for a moment.

“FRIDAY?” he says at last. “Tell me those aren’t the last words this guy says to his dad.”

“They are not,” FRIDAY replies.

“Are they _close to_ the last words?”

“They are not close,” FRIDAY says, just as simply.

“Oh. Good. I thought I—I thought I could see where this was going, and it… never mind.” He shakes his head, as if to clear it, and turns his bleary eyes to Loki. “How about you? We could, um, switch movies. If it’s bothering you. It’s a little headier than I expected.”

For a moment, Loki has trouble parsing the words. It cannot be that Master is asking for his opinion, for his _decision_. But then he recalls that where his old master instructed through pain and deprivation, _this_ master prefers to find positive ways to accomplish the same ends. Attempting to create a slave who can be happy in his role, pleased to serve—perhaps, in his experience, it brings better results.

Even as he realizes the connection, Loki reflects that there is a second goal here: to avoid disturbing his master. His master does not yet know how much Loki can take, and he does not wish to be troubled by Loki showing signs of distress. Through some means, his master had learned of Loki’s distress during the night, and woke him from the nightmare so that it would not cause problems; now he would turn off a movie for much the same reason.

“The movie does not bother me,” Loki says, shaking his head firmly. “It is…” He searches for positive things to say. “It reminds me of my father, and my brother.”

The words are out, the connection made, before he can catch himself; he really has no idea what his master might think of his slave bringing up family connections, let alone to a _royal_ family that he can no longer be a part of, even on this world. And he does not know how much history they share, himself and the Loki he’d replaced. Nor does he know how much detail Thor might have shared with Loki’s master.

But his master doesn’t seem to mind.

“Yeah?” His master snorts. “Guess we’ve got something in common after all. Which parts seem the most familiar?”

Loki flounders, unable to voice the obvious parts: This Edward Bloom seems to comprise the worst parts of Loki’s family, from the effortless charisma of Thor to the uncompromising lies of Odin. Odin and Thor, who must be first in all things, and who, at best, could be said to be oblivious to the harm they’ve done.

When the silence stretches too long, his master ventures, “I get the impression that Thor’s a bit full of himself. Your old man the same way? I mean, the two of you had to get it from _somewhere_ , right?”

Loki’s gut clenches as he’s torn between disrupting the peace—surely his master does not want to hear all the dirty secrets of Asgard, especially since Thor is his teammate—and contradicting his master. But his former master had taken pains—or, well, _given_ pains—to ensure that Loki would never lie to him. Or, rather, that the only lies that came from Loki’s mouth were those that his master had trained him to say.

Before the words can spill out of him, his master continues. “See, _my_ dad? Never really had time for me. Time to get to _know_ me. He loved me, I know he did—or, well, I know that _now_ , though there wasn’t much evidence of it while I was growing up—but he never really knew how to connect with me.

“There were times I hated him,” he murmurs into his glass. “And times when I just didn’t care.” He downs the glass and pours himself another.

“My father—Odin—was the king,” Loki says, not looking at his master. “When he didn’t make time for me, I thought that was… he had more important duties to fulfill. There is only one Allfather, and sometimes he must make hard decisions that the rest of us can’t even begin to understand.” Glancing down at his hands, he shudders.

“Did you hate him?” Master asks. “Before you understood that he had reasons for being such a crappy father?”

Miserably, Loki shakes his head. “Not back then. And afterwards… there was a moment, a brief moment, where I hated what he’d done, but then it didn’t seem to matter, because I was too busy hating _myself_.”

There’s silence between them for a long moment, and then his master huffs. “Yeah. I know what that’s like.” He sighs. “FRIDAY, unpause.”

 _I didn’t speak to my father again for three years_ , the movie says in Will’s voice, and Loki suddenly finds himself falling through the darkness again.

After the vault—after Odin had fallen into the Odinsleep, and Loki had fallen into madness—Loki had heard only two words from his father, the words that had sealed his fate: _No, Loki_.

So clearly rejected, he’d let go, and surrendered to the void, thinking it would be the end of the misery of his existence. Instead, he’d found himself in the clutches of monsters far more terrible than the tales he’d grown up on (and yet, somehow, less terrible than the man who’d eventually come to own him). Cut off from everything he’d ever known, he’d run and fought and struggled for two long years, until the monsters had broken him down and made him fit to serve their master. Who had sent him to retrieve the Tesseract, once he could no longer perceive a reason to resist.

The next time he’d seen his father, Odin had assumed Loki’s guilt; rather than attempt to restore their relationship, the Allfather’s words had served only to castigate him and then cast him aside for good. And Loki recalls doing the same in return, casting his father aside within his own mind and to anyone else who would listen: _He’s **not** my **father!**_

> _The truth is, I didn't see anything of myself in my father… and I don't think he saw anything of himself in me. We were like strangers who knew each other very well_.

And yet, for all their struggles, Loki _does_ see himself in his father. Sometimes the darker side—lies and manipulations, the lust for power, hatred of the Jotnar—but, other times, a more positive connection. The use of seidr, which the warriors of Asgard despised. An interest in long-term strategy, which Thor has never shared. A fear for the safety of his loved ones (few as they were), another concern that Thor had never shared until far too late.

And—he struggles to picture it, but he knows it’s there—a love for his mother (for Odin’s wife, for _Frigga_ ) so all-encompassing that her loss nearly broke the both of them.

Eventually, Loki had given up denying that he was Odin’s son.

In the end, his father’s death had affected him far more deeply than he could have imagined. So much so that, eventually, he’d reclaimed for himself the name of _Odinson_ … mere days before he’d become the only Odinson left alive. And before his master— _former_ master—had taken even that away from him, breaking him down to the point where he lost all sense of himself as a person. He’d survived, in part, by tucking away all the details of his past, aware that clinging to such memories could only do him harm.

> _It’s impossible to separate fact from fiction, the man from the myth. The best I can do is to tell it the way he told me. It doesn’t always make sense, and most of it never happened_.

But he remembers, now, a time before he’d begun to question his father’s love for him. In the vault, he’d believed that all of it was a lie, but was it? In the throne room, Odin’s taunt had seemed to confirm Loki’s worst assumptions ( _your birthright was to die, as a child, cast out onto a frozen rock_ ), and yet…

 _I love you, my sons. Frigga would have been proud_.

But how could one moment of connection undo centuries of rejection?

Still, it wasn’t as though Odin saved his lies purely for Loki. Even on the most important day of Thor’s life, Odin had lied to his face: _Thor… Odinson… my firstborn…_

Five minutes in, and the movie is making him question every detail of his long and frustrating life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can't think of much to say for the end note, so I'll point you at a site that had me in stitches last night: **The Editing Room** , which offers Abridged Scripts for all manner of movies. Check out, for example, [Thor: Ragnarok](https://www.the-editing-room.com/thor-ragnarok.html).
>
>> CHRIS HEMSWORTH: That was close. Lucky I had my trusty Mjolnir! I'm sure that barrage of hammer stunts was only a portent of EVEN MORE to come, we weren't giving it a last hurrah or anything!
>> 
>> KARL URBAN: You didn't see the trailer, did you.
> 
> ...or this, when Hela arrives on Asgard:
>
>> INT. BIFROST CONTROL ROOM
>> 
>> _Recurring fan favourites RAY STEVENSON and ZACHARY LEwhoops they're dead._
>> 
>> KARL URBAN: Not me though! I'm, ah, just the janitor? Hence my custodial-issue full battle armour.
> 
> Anyway, if you'd like a laugh, head on over and check out their Marvel scripts. Or even their other scripts ( _Zootopia_ was fun).


	3. Thresholds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vague memories of adventures rouse up in Loki’s head, journeys across the Realms—and they grow more vivid as he watches the little band of youngsters: Edward, and a girl, and three boys of varying shapes and sizes, even one noticeably from a different people.
> 
> (There is no sixth member of the group, no tagalong… but it wasn’t as though Thor’s little band had ever paid much attention to him; he might as well have been invisible.)
> 
> This Edward is, at least, more helpful than Thor, and more thoughtful, even to the point of musing over his own death, a thought that Loki is certain had never once crossed Thor’s awareness (not even up to the point of his actual demise).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, with the July Prompt out of the way, I can focus more on my fics. I've got two other chapters of things _mostly_ complete (one MCU, one POI), and I hope to post them soon; they're just throwing me some curve balls; see End Note for more information.
> 
>  **Content Warnings:** More slave-mindset angst. Tony's getting progressively more drunk. If I missed anything else, please let me know.

Loki has never been privy to the act of birth, but he gets the impression that the movie is playing up the event in a wholly unrealistic way.

His master greets the absurdity with uproarious laughter. “Shit, it’s like my dad wrote a movie about _Steve Rogers_.”

Recalling his encounters with Rogers—at least, Rogers in the other universe, the universe that Loki came from—Loki has to wonder about the potential resemblance that his master perceives.

A minute later, though, Will and his wife (now heavy with child) seem to be receiving bad news, and Loki’s master suddenly sobers up.

 _And what does Doctor Bennett say?_ Will asks into the phone; Loki could swear that his master holds his breath.

 _It’s more than they thought_ , Will explains to his wife, a moment later. _They’re going to stop chemo_.

“Chemo?” his master blurts, sitting up straighter. “Wait. Pause. FRIDAY, what… is the dad gonna die in this?”

“Affirmative,” FRIDAY chimes from the speakers.

Groaning, Master scrubs his face with his hands. “I thought I turned down a couple other movies because we don’t need to be crying over dying parents this early in the morning.”

“You did, sir.”

“And you still gave us a movie with dying parents?”

“You objected to dead mothers, sir, not to dead fathers.”

Loki’s master drops his head back against the back of the couch. “God, I miss JARVIS,” he murmurs.

“JARVIS?” Loki echoes—then stiffens up, realizing that he’s spoken out of turn and asked for information that perhaps his master doesn’t want him to know. His former master had been _excruciatingly_ clear: Whatever Loki needed to know, his master would tell him, and anything beyond that was not his concern.

“My old A.I.,” his new master explains, casually, with no indication that he’s disturbed by Loki’s behavior. “He was… he was better at extrapolating my desires from incomplete data. FRIDAY’s not so good at it yet. I say no dead mothers, she gives us a dying father. Urgh.” He turns to look Loki in the eyes; Loki drops his gaze. “Look, like I said, we can change movies. I’ve got plenty of others to choose from—didn’t mean to choose something that’d bring up bad memories or anything. Would you prefer something else?”

It’s the second time that his master has asked for Loki’s preferences, and Loki struggles not to show his own discomfort with the question itself (he’s gotten good at doing that, by necessity: hiding inner turmoil, and even the impression that he _is_ hiding inner turmoil). When was the last time he’d been allowed to express a preference, let alone had it requested of him? He prefers survival to death, but that much is obvious. And while there was a time when he would have chosen deprivation and pain over abasement and surrender, that time is long behind him.

Whatever other preferences he might hold are soft and fleeting, because he knows too well how pointless they are. Besides, he’s up here on his master’s sofa, comforted with fluffy blankets and even a little food that isn’t thin protein shake; how ungrateful would he be to ask for even _more_ accommodations?

Like clarity. A luxury, after all. It is Loki’s place to obey direct orders, and beyond that… he must find a way to please his master, to reduce the burden that his very presence creates. _Extrapolating my desires from incomplete data_. That is the more difficult aspect of his role: to determine, without being told, exactly what his master wants from him.

In this situation, what would his master’s wishes be?

A moment ago, Master was laughing, enjoying the movie. He hasn’t seen this movie before, so if he wishes to keep watching, then Loki shouldn’t get in the way of that. And Loki knows that his master does not wish to see his slave distressed.

“It is up to you, master,” Loki says, before the moment can stretch much longer. “I am not unduly troubled by this story, and it is certainly an interesting tale.”

There is not much else he could say without influencing his master’s decision one way or the other. If the tale brings up uncomfortable memories for Loki, then he’ll just have to keep them hidden so as not to disturb his master.

“Are you sure?”

Frozen for a moment, Loki reminds himself that _this_ master isn’t the one who uses tricks and traps to break down his slave’s sense of predictable reality. And his former master wouldn’t have used such a question anyway: He never did give second chances.

“I am certain,” he replies, and tries to smile.

Still looking skeptical, Master finally shrugs, then looks back at the movie and says, “Unpause.”

 _You need to go_ , Will’s wife says, quietly.

 _Probably tonight_ , Will agrees.

 _I’m going with you_.

 _No, no. You shouldn’t, it’s_ —

 _I’m going with you_ , Will’s wife repeats, a calm and loving certainty.

“I’m just going to call her ‘Pepper’,” Master says with an odd little smile, “until they tell us her actual name.”

The appellation baffles Loki for a moment, until he recalls that his master had referred to someone by that term. His wife? His betrothed? The mother of his child, in any case, or Loki had assumed that much from the context. It’s a strange name, to be sure, but then, Loki has little experience judging the names of those on Midgard.

They sit in silence as the movie shows Will and ‘Pepper’ in an airplane. Then the scene fades to a young boy in bed—Will again, with his father telling him stories.

This is the second time that the child has been shown in a bed, listening to stories. Loki’s memories of Asgard may have become fogged over in his head, but he’s sure that stories and beds don’t go together. Perhaps the child had frequently been ill?

The kind of tales that Loki is used to are meant to rouse the blood of warriors, to focus their courage and cement a sense of loyalty to the Realm. They are told around the campfire or in the dining hall, shared among recruits while waiting their turn at the training ring. Young Will is clearly too young for any such tales; this detail is one of many that baffles Loki as he watches the scene.

 _Your momma says I can’t tell you that one anymore_ , the man says, and even checks over his shoulder before beginning the tale, leaving Loki to wonder whether it’s normal on Midgard for the mother to overrule the father’s wishes. Perhaps that’s just with the children? He can’t imagine Odin sneaking around and worrying about Frigga’s opinion like this.

 _Now, children weren't allowed to go in the swamp_ , the father begins, _on account of the snakes, and the spiders, and the quicksand that'd swallow you up before you could even scream_.

Vague memories of adventures rouse up in Loki’s head, journeys across the Realms—and they grow more vivid as he watches the little band of youngsters: Edward, and a girl, and three boys of varying shapes and sizes. One of the boys is even noticeably of a different people, just as Hogun hailed from Vanaheim instead of Asgard.

(There is no sixth member of the group, no tagalong… but it wasn’t as though Thor’s little band had ever paid much attention to him; he might as well have been invisible.)

> Now, it's common knowledge that most towns of a certain size have a witch, if only to eat misbehaving children and the occasional puppy who wanders into her yard. Witches use those bones to cast spells and curses and make the land infertile.

Loki squirms a little, thinking of his mother, and the women who raised her. Is this really what Midgardians think of witches? But then one mentions being able to see the future—the form of your own death—and Loki has to wonder if perhaps the humans had run across true witches, but let the details get buried in superstitions built up over time.

As the children trade dares over approaching the witch’s house, the resemblance to Thor’s little gang fades a bit: Thor would never hesitate, and his friends would be right behind him in his folly. Loki can’t recall a time when they were ever the voice of caution or reason… not that Thor would have listened if they had been.

“—would really cut down on the amount of superstition.”

Loki freezes, sudden terror shooting from his toes to his scalp: He’s lost track of what his master was saying.

How could he have let himself get so caught up in the story, in his own memories, that he forgot his foremost duty as a slave? What fresh horror will be unleashed upon him to remind him of his place?

Shaking, Loki steels himself to be grateful for whatever instruction his master must give him. How could he _not_ be? He _means_ to be good, he _does_ , he wants with all his being to please his master and to show that he is a good slave, that he can be useful and not troublesome, that his master does not have to—

“Whoa—pause! Back up ten seconds. Oooh, yeah. Zoom in on those doorknobs, wouldja?”

And then his master is… laughing. Not mockingly, not threatening; Loki dares to glance at him and finds the man’s mouth wide open, his eyes crinkling at the sides.

“You don’t see that?” Master asks, wiping his eyes with the side of one hand.

Loki whips his head around to the screen again, desperate to show that he’s paying attention.

“Tell me that isn’t your battle helm,” Master says, grinning widely. “The horns you were wearing when you dropped by Earth the first time.”

It takes him a moment to make sense of what he’s seeing: small heads made of metal, with horns. Ornate doorknobs.

“They are… certainly quite similar,” he ventures, unwilling to contradict his master even to point out that his horns were facing outward, not inward, during the invasion. Or that the horns on the doorknobs are those of a goat, while even on Loki’s original headdress—the one he’d worn for his brother’s coronation—he bore the horns of the great cow, Audhumbla, who had freed Odin’s grandfather Buri and thus become a sign of honor among the Aesir.

Honor that Loki had borne for a thousand years, before learning that it was stolen valor: one more trick that Odin had used to gild Loki up in the semblance of royalty, all the while knowing that however he might dress it up, the form beneath the gold was still that of a beast.

He, Loki, supposed second prince of Asgard, deserved even less honor than a _cow_.

Why should it even matter, though? Why should it matter that he’s not Aesir, if all the Aesir are dead? Why should it matter if he’s a frost giant, since he’s been torn away from that planet, and then from Asgard, and then, eventually, from that entire dimension? He will never see another frost giant. The nature buried beneath his skin will never matter to anyone other than him, and he might as well get over it.

“What?” Master asks, tilting his head to look at Loki, and Loki realizes that he’s shrunk down in his seat, caught up in the misery of emotions echoing across time and memory.

Before Loki can respond, his master adds, “That was a badass helmet, by the way. You always did have a sense of style.”

And when Loki gapes at him, completely out of his depth, Master grins. “Hey, FRIDAY,” he says suddenly. “Put that on my list: Make horned doorknobs for Loki’s room. Copper, so we can get a nice green patina.”

“Added to your list,” FRIDAY responds. “Entry number three hundred eighty one.”

“Kinda low priority,” Tony says with a shrug, shooting Loki another glance. “But maybe when I need a break, I’ll crank some out. Unpause!”

Is his master mocking him, or offering an odd sort of gift? Loki finds himself caught between the two possibilities, unable to determine either his master’s intentions or his expected response.

But then, a moment later, the witch’s door swings open and Loki is struck with another image of the past: a wrinkled face under white hair, left eye covered with an eyepatch.

Frowning. Always frowning. Loki can scarce recall a moment when Odin had ever looked on him without disapproval.

Shortly, Thor—Edward—is bringing the witch back to his friends, and Loki cannot help but recall all the times when Thor brought calamity on his friends, simply by blundering into bad situations and never thinking through the possible results.

This Edward is, at least, more helpful than Thor, and more thoughtful, even to the point of musing over his own death, a thought that Loki is certain had never once crossed Thor’s awareness (not even up to the point of his actual demise).

(Loki has to push aside the thought of his own eventual death. He knows full well how it will go for him, and there is nothing that he can do to change that.)

Each new moment in the film brings old memories to the surface:

The last time Loki embraced Frigga (moments before Thor returned and brought everything crashing down around him).

The moment he’d last seen Odin (when he’d been in such turmoil that his silver tongue couldn’t find a single word to say until it was too late to say anything at all).

 _You don’t talk about that—not yet_ , and the many secrets ever hidden behind the walls of Asgard. Would Odin even have told him of his true nature at all, if Thor had never brought them to Jotunheim?

The wall of photos reminds him of the murals that adorned the walls and ceilings of Asgard… and how that bright, beautiful Realm is gone for good. In his home dimension, and in this one as well; perhaps there is no place left in all of reality where Asgard remains intact. (Some time ago, he might have taken some dark comfort from that thought. Now, it feels like another aspect of his self that has been taken from him.)

Will walks quietly into his father’s bedroom and sees the man lying there in a too-large bed, asleep. _Dad?_ he asks, quietly, and Master blurts out “Pause!” and the movie stops on the image of Edward

and Loki is caught up in the memory of the Allfather, deep in the Odinsleep, with Loki and Frigga seated beside him, not yet aware of how it would all go down. A moment before Loki would be handed the throne; a moment where he could still have made better choices, could have found a way to stop the misbegotten trajectory of what would become his life.

“It is not advisable to drink much more tonight,” FRIDAY observes, but Master is already pouring out a fresh glass of the Talisker Skye and knocking it down—and then pouring another one.

“If I’m going to get through this movie,” Master says, “I’m not gonna be sober.”

“We could stop,” Loki blurts without thinking, suddenly desperate to prevent his master from doing himself harm. “We could watch something else.”

“It’s in my head now,” Master protests, almost growling. “If I leave it unfinished, guess what’s gonna be in my nightmares tonight? Fuck.” He tips back the next glass, and coughs a little. “You can leave, if you like,” Master adds, his voice a little rough. “If you think you can sleep. I don’t—I didn’t want to upset you, or make the nightmares worse, I just… bad choice in movies, I guess. I’m sorry.” He tips the bottle over the cup again.

“Please,” Loki says, the word so unfamiliar on his lips since long before his captivity. “Please, Master, it’s okay, it’s… it was a good choice. You were trying to help me,” he adds, and feels the truth of those words even as he blurts them out.

“Yeah, so much for _trying_.” The bitterness in the words sting, because Loki knows full well that his master would not be in this plight were it not for his own compassion. And suddenly it feels unbearable to let him go through the ordeal alone.

“I am here, Master,” Loki murmurs, sliding to his knees beside his master’s feet, and laying his forehead on his master’s knee. “If you must continue, then know that I am here with you.”

The silence stretches for a long moment, while Loki wonders if perhaps he’s gone too far, and his master will be mad at him for daring to touch him, even through the thick fabric that covers his legs. But neither of them moves.

“He really did a number on you, didn’t he?” Master says finally, some undefinable emotion in his voice, and Loki still does not dare to move.

Then Master sighs. “All right. Get back up here. Guess we’re in it for the long haul.”

Loki scrambles to take his seat again, and to cover himself with the covers that his master has gifted him with, hoping to communicate that he is happy with whatever his master sees fit to give him. His master even reaches over to tuck the covers up closer to his chin, offering him a ghost of a smile, before turning back to the screen, taking a deep breath, and saying, “Unpause.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just so y'all know, I've been flitting among several different fics, getting pieces of this and that written, just not enough for a completed chapter. This one finally got complete, so it's the one that gets posted. I hope to soon post the next chapter of _To the Victor_ and _Unseen Things_ , which have mostly complete chapters _almost_ ready to go. And I'm making headway on other pieces as well, just much slower than I would like.
> 
> In addition, I've been persuaded to host an event in August to encourage people to try out my [Five Moments of (Nonsexual) Intimacy](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1031027) fic form. I hope to post an update to at least one FMI fic in the middle of this month, along with the official announcement of the event, and then (ideally) another at the start of August (although I'm hoping to make it a _My Little Pony_ one, because "FIM FMI" is just too apropos to pass up, and a six-person team works out perfectly for the idea). Anyway, it's possible that at some point during July here I will have to drop all other projects to get that event going, so this is kind of a heads-up if my (already molasses) productivity has to turn in a different direction for a while.


	4. It's a Heartbeat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Odin, Loki had felt it long before Thor caught a clue: the waning of a life, the pull of Valhalla on a soul that had overstayed its welcome in the mortal realms. With Thor, there hadn’t been even that much warning.
> 
> And in either case, all his powers of seidr and speech fell short, pale and useless in the face of the sudden inevitability.
> 
> How is it that the Norns left _him_ alive? Out of all the souls in Asgard, why _Loki?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My brain gets a little bit finicky about chapter length, and this chapter was sitting at the 1500-ish mark for the longest time; I couldn't figure out how to expand it. My chapters tend to be 2500-3500 words (5-7 pages at my general text density), and with the previous two chapters being around 3000 apiece, it felt weird to have a short chapter here.
> 
> But then I hit the Whumptober prompts, and it had "Survivor's Guilt," which slots in nicely with this update. So I went through and expanded, focusing more on that element, and how it applies to this specific version of Loki, who offers a _lot_ of layers to that emotion. Which bumped me up another thousand words (not quite), so I figure it's (fairly) reasonable for a chapter here.
> 
> The [Whumptober](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated) FAQ says that chapter updates count, if they were written with the prompts in mind during this month. I figure this counts, even though about 3/5 of it was written previously. I mean, if I pulled that 900 words off into its own little introspective, it'd count all by itself, so. And that feel was always an undercurrent for this chapter -- I just didn't lean on it quite so hard as I did with this expanded version.
> 
> * * *
> 
> I don't think it's been mentioned yet in this fic, but in the fic I'm basing this on, Thor from the other dimension was killed during the fight against Thanos. So this Loki has lost his brother, but then got pulled to this dimension, where Thor is still alive but _Loki_ is dead. The "brothers" sort of reconcile, even though they both know that neither is the "real" brother.
> 
> I think I positioned this fic before Loki here meets this dimension's Thor, but I'm not gonna bother to check that right now. Just know that this Loki has lost _100% of his family and all of Asgard_ , so he really has nothing left for him in the other dimension.

They’re both silent as they watch Will give his father a glass of water. There’s a tension in the room that seems to bleed out from the movie into real life.

Finally, Edward looks up at Will. _You are in for a surprise_.

 _Am I?_ Will asks casually, and Loki wants to laugh, because whatever Edward is about to tell him, it can’t be anything like the surprises that Loki has been through. And Odin didn’t see fit to warn him about any of them.

 _Having a kid changes everything_ , Edward says; beside Loki, Master chuckles knowingly.

Unsurprisingly, Edward didn’t participate in caring for the child, not when Will was small at least. Loki wonders why they’re even discussing it; it’s not as though a father could feed his own baby, not before the teeth come in.

He wonders how much persuading it took to get Frigga to feed him for the first time. A little Jotun child, fresh from the ice.

He wonders if he hurt her. If she had to use magic to keep herself safe. Or did Odin’s magic contain his form enough that he was just like any Aesir babe?

Did Frigga even nurse him? Perhaps they brought in a wet nurse. But it’s hard to believe that he and Frigga would have grown as close as they did if she hadn’t held him, often, while he was young.

Did Odin hold him, when he was young? Has he forgotten even that?

The next words catch him off guard: _You spend years trying to corrupt and mislead this child, fill its head with nonsense… and still it turns out perfectly fine_.

 _You think I’m up for it?_ Will asks, seemingly unbothered by the admission.

 _You learned from the best_ , his father replies.

It all crashes in on him suddenly, _brutally_ : everything that lies and manipulation have cost him.

For centuries, Loki had honed his ability to manipulate, relishing the power it gave him over others even as it cemented his reputation as the God of Lies. And yet it had turned out that that title would be better borne by Odin, who had spent over a thousand years deceiving not only the Realm but even his own supposed son, building up a false foundation for his very sense of self and leaving it all to crumble the moment the truth got revealed.

Odin had kidnapped him, misled him, set him up as a false rival to sharpen his true son; Odin had filled Loki’s head with fables and his heart with hatred for his own kind, so deeply that even now, in the absence of Asgard, Loki cannot bear to look upon his own form.

Odin had spent centuries corrupting him, and it had worked beyond all measure, and Loki is _anything_ but fine.

Will, apparently, has also learned the benefits of lying, even to his own mother.

How often did Loki lie to his mother? He can barely recall her face, let alone that sort of detail about their relationship. Only one occasion sticks out: the night that he murdered Laufey, there in the chamber as Odin slept.

Even then, he has to wonder if he actually _lied_ , or if he merely told the truth in a way that led her to misinterpret it.

Not that that’s much better.

_People needn’t worry so much_ , Edward says on the screen. _It’s not my time yet; this is not how I go_.

( _I have no plans to die today_ , Thor’s voice resounds in Loki’s head, along with Heimdall’s answer: _None do_. In all the time that Loki had known him, Thor had never considered even the _possibility_ that he might die, and he’d been shocked each time death had almost claimed Loki. And then, then, death had come for Thor at last… at the hands of a supposed ally, and it had caught them all off guard.)

Will questions his father’s assurance, discounting the possibility of fate and prophecies. Even here, near the end of his life, Edward won’t give his son a straight answer; Loki feels his stomach clench up again, as he wonders over all the many details that Odin could have told him, yet refused.

 _Your mother thought we wouldn’t talk again. Look at us, we’re talking fine_.

“Pause!” Master calls out, and rubs a hand over his face, bringing Loki back to the awareness that his master is beside him—his master, who is putting himself through a painful experience out of some sense of obligation to his slave.

But Loki hasn’t a clue how to do anything to make the situation better, so he stays quiet, huddled in the fuzzy blanket that his master provided for him.

There’s a long moment where his master stares at the ceiling, and Loki wonders if it’s a trick of the light that there seems to be tears in his eyes.

When the moment stretches on, neither of them moving, the silence builds until Loki cannot help but break it:

“Master?”

A sudden ragged breath brings his master back into the room, and he shoots a shaky smile at Loki, his expression not wanting to settle on any one emotion.

“You, uh, you never know how much time you’ve got, do you?” Master murmurs. “You think they’re going to be there forever, and then you get to a certain age and you realize that yeah, they’re gonna die—someday—but ‘someday’ ought to be decades in the future, not… they walk out that door and just never come back. The mom and dad who you thought would always protect you can’t even protect _themselves_.”

The undercurrent of anguish cuts through the fog in Loki’s brain, pulling up memories: The guard informing him of Frigga’s death. Odin turning to stardust right beside him.

 _This day, the next, a hundred years—it’s nothing! It’s a_ heartbeat. _You’ll_ **_never_** _be ready_.

Thor, who should have outlived Loki and ruled Asgard for millennia, being torn apart by nanites, reaching out toward a horrified brother who had no way to do anything but watch.

“Right before he died,” Master says, “I was in one of those ‘I don’t even care’ moods. Acted like he wasn’t even in the room. Almost wish I’d said something nastier, anything at all, instead of just… nothing. And then… he was gone.”

Before Loki can stop them, the words spill out, as they hadn’t that day: “I couldn’t… I couldn’t even say anything.”

With Frigga, the last words he’d never thought to be his last: _You’re not my mother_. Amidst all that he’s forgotten, that one cruel cut stands out, carved crystal in his memory: his words, her face as she took the blow and tried to smile.

Gentle to the last.

With Odin, Loki had felt it long before Thor caught a clue: the waning of a life, the pull of Valhalla on a soul that had overstayed its welcome in the mortal realms. With Thor, there hadn’t been even that much warning.

And in either case, all his powers of seidr and speech fell short, pale and useless in the face of the sudden inevitability. There was just too much between them, far too much to put into words, to hash out in the moments left to them.

 _And then he was gone_.

“Your dad?” Master asks softly, and the tears spring to Loki’s eyes. He buries his face in his knees, ashamed to be sullying the blankets, but it would be worse to disturb his master with the force of his grief.

The sofa dips beside him, and an arm goes around his shoulders. “Hey,” Master says, squeezing him lightly through the blanket, his voice layered with unexpected compassion. “Wanna talk about it? You don’t have to, just… if you want to, I’m listening.”

It’s a long moment before he can take in a shaky breath and try to explain.

“I couldn’t say goodbye to any of them,” he admits, feeling the ache deep in his heart. “I wasn’t even there when Mother died—when, when Frigga, the Queen of Asgard, when she got killed. I was in the dungeons; I didn’t even _know_. If I had been there, I might have done _something_.

“Or… or maybe I would have been just as useless. When Thor died, I was right beside him, but I couldn’t do anything to save him, not even with all my magic, and it was just too fast for either of us to say a word.

“And when… when Odin died… I knew it was coming, I _felt_ that he was moving on, but it’s just… what do you say in such a moment?” His breaths come faster, the words spilling out of him: “He, he called me his son, said he was proud of me, but… how does that undo a thousand years of lies, of favoritism, of never being able to please him no matter how hard I tried, never knowing _why_ … a thousand years of blaming me for acting on the lies _he taught me_ —”

It’s _still_ too much. He pushes his face into his master’s chest and sobs brokenly, caught up in the knowledge that he’ll never see any of them again, that all of the people he’s ever known or cared about are gone and Asgard is gone and he alone is left, and that even death will not reunite them. That whatever might have made things better is forever beyond his grasp. The loneliness crushes in on him until he almost cannot _breathe_.

How is it that the Norns left _him_ alive? Out of all the souls in Asgard, all the warriors and smiths and merchants, all the bards and scholars and farmers, all the cadets and children with such great promise before them: why _Loki?_ Why the bastard son of Laufey, the stolen serpent raised up to believe he was Aesir? Why the sullied princeling, the _ergi_ drawn to the mystic arts, whose powers had been used to play tricks, to invade and destroy, yet proved next to useless any time it actually counted?

How could _he_ be the one soul left to prove that Asgard had once existed—he who can’t even recall what the palace looked like, or the throne room, or the dining hall? Even his own chambers are as mist before his mind’s eye, dissolved into vapors by the agonies he’s endured at the hands of Thanos, the Chitauri, The Other… and his former master, who broke him to pieces more thoroughly than the others, and never let him catch his footing long enough to take in all the damage, let alone begin to stitch himself back together.

And now, with him brought to a new dimension, there is no one left at all in the place he used to call home. Did the Norns plan it that way? Is this a punishment for some great offense that Odin or Thor or the whole Realm of Asgard had been complicit in? Or could it be that the Norns cannot predict the forces that come through from other dimensions—could not anticipate Tony Stark appearing and stealing Loki away from his other self?

Or perhaps it is simply that the tale of Asgard is done, and its people moved on to Valhalla and the fields of Freya, there to lead better lives… with Loki left alone as punishment. But for what? For striking at Jotunheim, invading Midgard? Taking over the throne in Odin’s stead, stealing his valor? Abandoning the Realm when Hela was unleashed against its people, and trying to lose himself in the haze of Sakaar, already accepting that his people were gone? Maybe all of it; he has so much to answer for.

Perhaps it is because he gave Thanos the tools to win the war… first by showing him the pathways to the Nine Realms, and then by failing to make clear (to Thor, to Odin, to Midgard, to _anyone_ ) what was coming… and then, finally, by handing him the Tesseract rather than watch Thor suffer and die.

For that, he still had to watch Thor die, though perhaps his suffering was not so prolonged as it might have been.

Whatever he might have done to offend the Norns, it seems he’s piled up more than enough crimes to deserve what they’ve done to him. More, in fact; he might deserve to be a slave, a prisoner, an experiment, but he cannot imagine that he deserves to be held and comforted by the man who’s claimed him as his property.

His master is ruffling his hair. That’s the first sensation that makes it through, after the worst of his breakdown has passed and he’s just sniffling through the remnants of tears. It’s such an odd sensation; he can’t recall anyone playing with his hair before, aside from members of the Grandmaster’s court—and he never found those touches _soothing_.

His master, whose chest is softly rumbling as he hums some unfamiliar tune, seems to _intend_ to soothe him, which isn’t as surprising as Loki would have found it just a few hours ago; he’s adjusting to the reality that his master’s peace of mind requires his slave to be calm and somewhat comfortable. Whether that means setting up a movie night to disrupt his nightmares, or offering physical pleasures to offset his distress, his master seems willing to take unusual steps to see to his slave’s welfare.

Only his master’s sigh brings him back to himself, to the awareness that he’s soaking Master’s shirt with his tears and clinging like a child.

Master’s head falls back against the back of the sofa. “And here we are, sobbing over dead mothers _and_ fathers at three a.m. How did I know this was coming?”

But oddly enough, he doesn’t seem angry. Just… tired.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content Warnings:** The movie brings more memories to light; these include a lot of details of manipulation, lies, and gaslighting.
> 
> Loki suffers from survivor's guilt after losing his entire family. Also, his memories have been partly lost, partly corrupted, due to the lengthy abuse he suffered in the other dimension, so he has to struggle to remember things like what his mother looked like or the kind of activities they bonded over. He also believes, at least to some degree, that the horrible things that have happened to him are something he _deserves_ , perhaps a punishment laid on him by the Norns themselves.
> 
> There may be elements I've missed; it's late and I'm tired. If you notice anything that ought to be warned for, please do let me know!


End file.
